ETERNAL OPTIMISM IS WHAT WEDDLE PEDDLES

Mike McCoy is selling confidence, and the best player on his team is buying.

“We’re not rebuilding,” said Eric Weddle, whom Chargers teammates voted the team’s Most Valuable Player in 2012.

Weddle continued. “We’re not going to take a couple years to get back to it,” he said.

Then, creating more guffaws coast to coast than Leno or Letterman did all week, Weddle declared the Chargers the NFL’s best team.

Really, he did.

I thought the confidence may be a Utah shtick, after seeing McCoy, a fellow Ute, backslap Weddle at Chargers Park and then bellow that Utah is a great institution.

Actually, it’s a McCoy thing.

“He comes off very headstrong, very confident, knows what he wants — and we’re here to win a championship,” Weddle said.

So the new ball coach sees the big picture, even if this is his first job as the top boss. There’s a silver football handed out every February. The Chargers lack one. The objective is to get one, and McCoy needs to make sure his players believe they can. Or else, why bother?

“We’re not here just to be .500,” Weddle said. “We’re not here to maybe win the AFC West here and there. We want to win a Super Bowl. Just his belief, it rubs off on us.”

Norv Turner, as the Cowboys playcaller, was part of two Super Bowl winners. He also worked the confidence game, such as when he wore Super Bowl bling at Chargers Park. Not advancing to a Super Bowl in his six seasons here cost Norv his job, even with a year’s pay left. On the day Dean Spanos fired him, when Norv said goodbye to the players, he wore one of the giant diamond rings.

Several Chargers teams far more talented than the current one were all playing golf every February, while the Roman numerals were being contested.

Weddle noticed. “Once the season ended and you see guys let go, you get down a little bit,” he said, “and you just don’t know what the team’s going to be like.”

McCoy arrived from Denver, where the Broncos had gone 13-4, and began to work on the team’s psyche. Prepping, he ordered new practice fields, new paint colors, even new light bulbs at Chargers Park. The message was obvious: Out with the stale past, in with fresh, if cliché-logged present.

Alas, us media hacks are still around, and when choosing not to buy sugary soda (didn’t see any Kool-Aid) from the newly installed vending machine at Chargers media HQ, we ask pesky questions, some rooted in the team’s decline of 2010-12.

Chargers players, when asked about the past, either change the subject or deal with it fast.

Momentum begins between the ears; Vince Lombardi never said that, but he could’ve.

“We’re trying to win a Super Bowl,” Weddle said. “That is our only goal. Anything else is a failure.”

By that definition, the past was an unrelenting failure, so why revisit it?